


Something Lost, Regretfully Found

by dismalzelenka



Series: A Song in the Stillness [5]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: :'), Angst, Blood Magic, Child Murder, F/M, I'm Sorry, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Minor Character Death, Non-Warden Amell, Suicidal Ideation, a song in the stillness, amell inquisitor AU, y'all can send me straight to hell after this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 05:13:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13563588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dismalzelenka/pseuds/dismalzelenka
Summary: Cullen Rutherford discovers their Fade-marked prisoner is none other than Solona, his former charge and lover, and recalls with disturbing clarity how their relationship ended.Solona Amell meets Cassandra's Commander and sees a familiar face that brings back a slew of unwanted memories.They may be working together now, but whatever they had before, he feels only regret, and she, hatred.





	Something Lost, Regretfully Found

**Author's Note:**

> A DWC post in response to the prompt "the sight of something you lost, returned" for Amell. 
> 
> Another fine dismalzelenka exercise in "I meant to write something fluffy but my hand slipped and now there's sadness all over my page, how did THAT get there, heh, hah, ahem." 
> 
> For context: In this AU, Solona Amell is not the Hero of Ferelden. She left Kinloch with Surana after Broken Circle, spent a brief stint in Kirkwall, and then left after a few years after hearing rumors in the mage underground that parts of Rivain were safe harbors for runaway apostates. She survives the Dairsmuid Annulment, which in this AU takes place a few months before the Conclave is called, and hops on a ship to Ferelden for reasons I cannot yet disclose because major spoilers. And then she falls out of a rift into the ruins of the Temple of Sacred Ashes. :)

“I hope they're right about you,” Cullen said grimly, eyes still fixed on the battlefield. “We lost a lot of good people to get you here-”

He trailed off when he saw her. The years had changed her, almost beyond recognition. At first glance parts were still the same: same porcelain tinted, lightly freckled cheeks, same unruly mass of black curls, same piercing, ocean blue eyes. But that was where the similarities ended.

The Solona Amell he knew in Ferelden didn't carry a gaze of tempered steel. She didn't have hands rough and scarred from physical combat, covered in the blood of her fallen enemies, blood she also spat and wiped unceremoniously on her trousers.

The Solona Amell he knew in Ferelden didn't even own trousers.

She now bore two gleaming daggers at her sides in addition to the staff slung across her back, and gauging from the muscle filling out the tight sleeves of her shirt she had long since learned how to wield both with deadly efficiency. Her face was set in grim determination as she rubbed a particularly viscous patch of demon blood from her knuckles.

“I'll do what I can,” she said flatly, her demeanor stoic but professional.

_Does she even recognize me?_

Then, _does she know the things I've done?_

“That's…” He searched her face for some trace of the woman he once knew, but whatever softness he remembered of her had long fled the face now standing in front of him. “That's all we can ask,” he managed to say without stuttering. “Maker have mercy on us.”

“This is Commander Cullen,” Cassandra interrupted. “I see you've already met.”

“A pleasure, Commander,” Solona said thinly. Her eyes practically bore a hole through his head.

_Andraste’s mercy._

She eyed him up and down, her gaze detached and appraising and entirely lacking in warmth. “Maker watch over you, _Ser_.”

He felt a chill rip through his spine at that. Solona did always have an interesting way with words, though as much as he dreaded speaking with her again, _facing_ her again, he was grateful she was at least working _with_ them. She had been formidable enough ten years ago as a young woman fresh out of her Harrowing. The ironbark staff she now bore, he imagined, had spilled more than its fair share of blood in her hands.

_How can she even hold such a thing with her bare hands in this weather?_

His last words to her had been accompanied by a dagger he'd driven through her ribs himself. _Leave me, demon,_ he'd growled as she embraced him with tears streaming down her face. _She is dead. Leave me be._ The knife in his hand, the steel biting cold into his fingers. Her surprised gasp when the tip pierced her flesh. The shocked look of utter betrayal on her face as he'd stumbled back from her after.

She hadn't had enough power of her own to break down the walls of his cage. Her blood had carried her through that, just as it had drained her own energy in order to knit his torn skin and broken bones back together, to stabilize his body so he could have a chance at surviving  The memory made his skin crawl. She had saved him, but _at what cost?_

_Would that you'd left me to die._

He couldn't help but wonder if she bore fresher scars beneath those sleeves. The daggers on her belt suddenly seemed to hold a different kind of danger, and he barely suppressed the shudder that ripped through his body.

 _Blood mage._ His Solona, resorting to blood magic to save _him._ Of all of his transgressions, driving her to such a solution was the biggest regret he would ever carry. Maker save him, would that she never drew a blade on herself again. He prayed fervently that she had not and steeled himself instead for the battle looming on the horizon 

* * *

Solona hadn't spared a single thought for Knight-Captain Cullen Rutherford since she'd clambered onto the first ship back to Ferelden at the Dairsmuid docks, nursing a deep gash on her leg, ears still ringing from a templar’s Silence. The air was still thick with smoke, with the acrid scent of charred flesh, the sick tang of freshly spilled blood. The choking, suffocating smell of death.

Her mind was too preoccupied with other thoughts. Darker thoughts. Images of the home she'd found only a few short years ago, the home that now lay in smoldering ruin, piled high with the bodies of mages and templars she'd come to see as _family._ Of Seth Benoit, the mousy haired, olive skinned boy with roots in Orlais and Rivain, two years past coming into his magic and loving every second he spent learning to wield it. His parents, wailing, held back by faceless foreign templars as their only son’s sanctuary burned to the ground with his lifeless body inside.

Those faceless foreign templars had dragged them both from the cabinet they'd claimed as their sanctuary, where he'd huddled in her arms shaking, holding back tears of absolute terror with his face buried in her shoulder. They'd torn him from her arms, gripped her with hands sheathed in steel, made her watch as they did the unthinkable, letting her know in no uncertain terms that she was next.

Another templar, _her Knight-Commander,_ she'd realized with horror, bursting through the ruined door, eyes wild with rage, tightly coiled curls askew and falling into a dark face streaked with blood and ash, her sword drawn and shield ready. “You dare claim the Maker’s will and put innocent _children_ to the sword?” she’d spat as she charged forward.

One of the templars gripping her arms behind her back had declared heresy, that the Maker’s will demanded the lives of _all_ who practiced forbidden magic under His gaze, his tirade cut short by the blade that found a gap in his armor and removed his head clean from his body.

“Your fucking Maker burn you till the Void claims you,” the Knight-Commander had spat. Swords, clashing with deafening rings, the sickening crunch of shields against flesh and bone. She'd been thrown to a corner, too dazed to do much but stare with blurring eyes at the carnage in front of her, and then _she’d_ emerged from the bodies, stumbling, blood streaming down her breastplate, a single word gasped from her lips.

“Go.”

She'd found her legs, somehow. She'd found them, she'd dived through a broken window and hit the ground running, and she'd run until she thought her lungs would explode from exertion. The Circle was lost, this much she knew with sickening certainty, and as much as her mind screamed she stayed behind to defend it, she knew by now there simply wasn't anything _left_ to defend.

No, her golden eyed former lover hadn't crossed her mind then. Her mind was too full already, stuffed to the brim with anger and grief and memories that robbed her nightly of sleep and sanity both.

She saw him in front of her, and perhaps once, a decade ago and more, she would have felt affection. Love. Those memories were vivid enough still. Stolen trysts in closets and behind corner bookcases in the darkest parts of the library. Whispered promises in the dead of night, confessions of devotion between lovers in the throes of passion, desperate and pleading _I love yous_ falling from lips claimed over and over with kisses that carried more meanings than they could count.

One memory overshadowed them all. Another tragedy, a lifetime ago it seemed now, another nightmarish recollection of smoke and blood and death. Relief at his body, broken but _alive,_ safe in her arms. And then the bite of a blade driven between her ribs by the man who'd promised her everything.

Death, it seemed, was destined to kiss everything she'd ever cherished.

“Maker watch over you, _Ser,”_ she'd spat, perhaps with more vitriol than she'd intended in front of strangers who held her future in her hands, but somewhere deep down she knew she no longer cared about her future. Everyone she'd dared to love was gone, and it seemed the one she'd given everything and received a dagger from in return was the only one left.

Fuck her future. If this mission didn't go tits up with her life in the balance, she'd probably end it herself.


End file.
